


Legere Regnum

by levromethamphetamine



Series: 195 Menelaus/Helen Scenes [2]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Iliad - Homer
Genre: F/M, atreidae can't read hive rise up, love might be real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:28:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24542359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levromethamphetamine/pseuds/levromethamphetamine
Summary: Do you ever grow up in a nightmare house and cannot read. But also you are now going to be king of Sparta. And love might be real. Much to think about.
Relationships: Helen of Troy/Menelaus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Series: 195 Menelaus/Helen Scenes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1680475
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	Legere Regnum

“You’re still wearing the crown I gifted you” 

Menelaus paused in his step. He had wanted to sneak up on Helen, surprise her with a kiss on the cheek or some other domestic gesture, but as usual she proved impossible to startle. Artemis herself would covet her sharp eyes, her hawk’s ears.

Absently Menelaus touched his hand to his head with the soft reverence of a priest handling something sacred. For a second he had forgotten that he still wore the golden circlet, molded so as to resemble intertwined branches, although it had been a few days since Helen’s fine-sculpted hands had placed it with the utmost care upon Menelaus’s brow, face aglow with joy taking the place of the sun as Menelaus had knelt shakily to accept his prize. 

Each night he removed it to investigate it with an almost religious awe, moved by the power it held, what it represented - not so much that it named him the King of Sparta upon their wedding, but that it had been placed upon his head by Helen’s  _ own _ hands, that by the calling of her  _ own _ heart she had chosen  _ him _ for her king. 

Thus it held more power than all the amassed legions of Mycenae, or all the men Sparta itself could master, for that matter, and thus he had donned it every day since, as though it, and Helen’s favor, would disappear from his bedchamber if it did not touch his skin. 

“Of course” he said quietly. “It was your gift to me. With it you … chose me”

“I chose you long ago, Menelaus” she replied, her voice smooth and gentle and awash with genuine fondness, though her cheeks flushed also, like she wasn’t expecting to be that honest, that open with him. Like it had just slipped out, unbidden. Menelaus’s body warmed, heat pooling in his cheeks too. 

He closed the distance between them, encouraged in his boldness by her, and placed one hand gently on her waist, just reveling in her presence, in the astounding beauty of her, even so simply clad in plain white linen, and imagined doing the same every day for the next fifty years, imagined a life freed from fear and filled with love. With his eyes closed, he savored the image for one rich moment.   
“It seems strange to think that soon we may be, together - what is this, that you’re doing?” he said when Helen’s body shifted beneath his hand and she twisted to switch the object in hers. Menelaus hadn’t even noticed the tableau before her, his field of vision as ever limited to Helen herself, but now he saw a small mountain of clay tablets strewn about the table before her. He had seen Tyndareus more than once stand before a collection of clay tablets bearing messages he could not read, brow furrowed in the same way Helen’s had been before he caught her attention, but he had assumed it had to do with planning the war that had restored Agamemnon to his throne - small as it was, it had required planning and coordination beyond Sparta itself , and though Helen was masterfully competent at all her father had taught, he did not think he had taught her warfare. 

“Taxes” she said simply, with a sigh. “Usually my mother handles civil monetary affairs, or delegates it to her scribes. But she and my father are getting older and if we are to rule soon, they say, we ought to know how ruling is done. Even, and especially, the mundanities.” She scrutinized the tablet she was holding for a second longer, then placed it in a group according to some arcane methodology he could not fathom, and leaned her forehead against her outstretched hand the way she always did when her patience, already thinner than most, was being sorely tested. Even this simple motion of her body, it seemed, was endowed with a certain grace, and it made his heart leap in conjunction with her automatic grouping of him with her, her assumption that they were, already, a functional unit. 

_ We _ , she had said, as if they were already man and wife, king and queen, as if their bodies and souls were already one and the upcoming wedding was more ceremonial than anything else. 

The simple word stirred him, and he tried to keep from showing the extent of its impact. He touched again the crown atop his head and wondered if the other suitors had recognized its true significance, if they would have been so affected by the slight changes in Helen’s speech once it was bequeathed to them. And he wondered if it would have fit their heads more exactly. Maybe in Helen’s mind it was the case that they were esteemed as one already, that she had, as she had said, ‘chosen’ him long ago, and their official betrothal was itself an act of mere ceremony, but to Menelaus, who found his new position a matter of unfathomable luck and good fortune, it was the most important, earth-shattering moment of his life to date. 

“Is it,… a duty?” Menelaus asked, and shifted uncomfortably on his feet, hesitant to betray his ignorance, to make Helen regret, or gods forbid, retract, her decision. But he had learned precious little of a king’s role in Mycenae, having spent so much of his youth, his formative years, in a state of abject terror, in an isolated realm of fear and darkness, and he hated even to reflect on the few things he had gleaned in that nightmarish palace. Tyndareus had done all he could, but a mere few years of effort could not make up for a lifetime of neglect. 

Part of him felt foolish for asking the question even before it had left his lips, though he tried to remind himself his fears were irrational- Helen had never been anything but patient and gentle with him when he asked, with his familiar shy embarrassment, on the details of any topic, no matter how ripe with naïveté. And yet part of him fretted, wondering if making such an admittance so early into their betrothal would make Helen regret her choice - surely an Odysseus or an Ajax would be more familiar with the administrative duties of ruling than a son of Atreus, bringing all the burdens and blindnesses of the title into a house yet untouched by its crimes.

“Oh, yes” Helen muttered ruefully. “Dull as dirt, though. Much of the administration, finances included, the scribes can and do handle, but these…these are petitions written to the king himself about tax burdens of certain nobles, or records collected from entire provinces on our behalf by lower level bureaucrats... and thus we at least must give them a glance with our own eyes. It’s... only fair.” She finished with another sigh and slumped her shoulders, utterly overwhelmed, it seemed, by the enormity of the task, although now that Menelaus looked more closely she seemed to have done some initial sorting and organization already.

Menelaus peered at the tablet she now held, slightly larger than her hand and covered in minuscule marks, utter nonsense to him, written as though the writer assumed they would never again find a suitable piece of clay and had endeavored to cram a life’s litany of complaints onto its unprepared face before the sun went down

“I- I don’t know…”

He leaned over her shoulder and squinted hard, as if by intense focus he could wrench meaning from the words and sheer effort could make up for a lack of education, trying to parse out individual signs, at least, to little avail, and his heart sank like a stone. Helen, in the middle of this internal crisis, seemed to have scanned it in an instant and the tilt of her head (away from its face) and the position of her hand (beneath her chin) indicated she was done reading and was contemplating its message, and of course she was, how could Menelaus be surprised. 

She paused in her thought and turned her head, tilted it up to him so the light streaming in from the high windows (absent from the palace of the Atreidae at Mycenae, their presence surprised him even now) illuminated the hint of gold in her eyes, and for a moment his breath left him along with his shame. But then both crashed down on him like a massive wave on the beaten hull of a battered ship when she said “What don’t you know?”

“I- what does it- say?”  
  
“The first line here, or…”  
  
Menelaus’s shoulders slumped. “I - I can’t read. I can’t read any of it. I can’t - I never learned, at all.” Absolutely on fire with embarrassment, Menelaus tried to fight the lump rising in his throat, the tears coming to his eyes unbidden, like a child, the weak, pathetic creature he had been in Mycenae. Remembering the way his father had burned incandescent with rage when he reacted similarly to his myriad cruelties only furthered the onslaught and he rubbed at the corners of his eyes hurriedly with a hand that came away wet, before Helen could see him crumble.  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“When I was young…Atreus, my father… he didn’t take time to , he didn’t have much time for - teaching us the ways of a king, how to rule - he had … other priorities” Menelaus managed. He noticed Helen biting her lip, fidgeting with her skirts, clearly uncomfortable, as she always was when he brought up his father and his childhood, but this time she wasn’t looking away. She held his gaze, eyes filled with concern, and put one hand upon his arm as if to steady him. Somehow that was almost worse, and Menelaus pressed his face into his hands, unable to look at her for another second if he didn’t want to be wholly drowned in shame and guilt and some ancient, buried, dark fear, dredged up to the surface and summoned with his father’s name.

“I - I apologize for being so… unprepared” Menelaus continued, through the latticework of his fingers, desperately trying to keep the piling tears at bay, squeezing his eyes shut but unable to keep the image of Helen, what she must look like, how she must be looking at him right now, out of his mind. Light as it was, made all of gold, the wrought crown on his head suddenly felt heavy as stone.    
“I- I’m sorry and, If you regret - if - if- there is another man, better suited-” The next word caught in his throat and he tried to force back the sob it had become.  
  
“What are you saying?” Helen replied, clearly aghast. She pried his hands away from his face but she did not look near as angry as her tone suggested.    
“Menelaus….” Even now, the way she said his name was musical, soothing, a cool balm on a fresh wound.  
“I chose  _ you _ . And I would choose you again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.” Her free hand found the small of his back and after a perfect moment’s pause, her lips found his.

“I... “ Menelaus took a deep breath, shakily, when they parted, and swallowed what little pride he had. He felt lightheaded, dizzy.    
“Can you … teach me? If I am to be the king, I - I should know”    
  
“ _ If _ ? Menelaus, you  _ will _ be my husband.  _ AND _ my king. Don’t think you’re getting out of that because you don’t know how to read- yet.” She grinned cheekily at him, trying to lighten the heaviness that had settled on his broad shoulders, and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, then nestled into the curve of his arm, leaning against his chest with a soft sigh.    
“You didn’t even have to  _ ask _ ” she continued. “Of course I’ll teach you”. She punctuated her sentence with a third kiss, a gentle touch of her soft lips to his bearded chin, and when she raised herself up on the balls of her feet to reach, Menelaus wrapped both arms loosely around her waist and beamed. Only Helen could turn his despair into joy in the blink of an eye, could move him to such depths of emotion at all, and for not the first time, Menelaus found himself relating to the romantic hymns of the poets his brother so dismissed.

“This is a difficult one even for me” she admitted, gesturing at the crowded tablet in her hands. “Klymenos has abysmal handwriting and tends to use three words when one would do the job just as well, but he hasn’t erred in his sums since he started working under my father, so he’s still one of our most important officials outside of the palace. Now here -” and Helen pointed to a slightly more organized segment of the tablet, composed of symbols in a column on the left and lines in a column on the right. Still inscrutable to Menelaus’s untrained eye, but at least separable and identifiable as some sort of list.    
  
“The syllabic signs are trickier but numbers and lists of objects like this are pretty simple. Well, relatively. So on the left here, that’s the object in question that’s being given as tax, and on the right, that’s the number of that object. Each symbol represents one kind of good. So this one-” and here Helen singled out one of the simplest signs on the left hand column, a rectangle with two legs extending past the borders, like a simplified drawing of a loom. “This means ‘cloth’. And on the right there’s this collection of lines and circles - the leftmost symbol here, that’s ‘one hundred’. The horizontal lines, there’s five, and there’s one vertical line. Each horizontal line stands for ten, and each vertical line for one, so therefore-”   
  
“One hundred and fifty one bolts of cloth” Menelaus said before she finished speaking, and Helen beamed. Relief flooded him - it made sense, it didn’t seem complicated at all, at least deciphering these simple pictograms.    
  
Helen must have felt the tension leave him because she replied “See, it isn’t difficult! Well, this part anyway, and that’s what’s most important for administrative purposes. If you can memorize the symbols and learn to read numbers, you’ll be most of the way there.” She gestured at the rest of the crowded tablet dismissively. “This is just formal and formulaic greetings, news, questions for us, explanations of discrepancies”   
  
“Wait, we must read that as well!” Menelaus protested. “This man and his writing is the connection between us and a distant contingent of our people! Surely we have a duty to read and respond to the whole of his letter and their concerns, however frivolous!”

There was a pause and Menelaus worried he had overstepped his bounds, and withdrew into himself. Who was he to challenge Helen in this realm, with his ignorance being as profound as it was?    
“Gods, you’ll be beloved as king” Helen said finally, her voice soft and sincere. Her gaze was fixed somewhere in the middle distance, like she was seeing into the future and speaking prophetically. “If I didn’t know I would not take you for your father’s son - or Agamemnon’s brother, for that matter.”

“Agamemnon is the  _ reason _ I am able-”

“And this is why you should not doubt yourself, or question your ability, or my choice.” Helen interrupted Menelaus, as if he hadn’t even replied, perhaps not wanting to have this too-familiar argument again.   
  
“I wasn’t-”   
Menelaus tried to protest but this time when she interrupted Helen spoke as if with another’s voice, with a seriousness rarely present in her laughing eyes, the near-constant quirk of her lips. She whirled around to face him again, ordering him with her very stance to grant her his full attention. Menelaus obeyed.    
  
“You can teach a man to read easily- I’ll have you writing me love letters by the time the wheat has ripened in the fields. But you cannot teach a man to think as you did, to think automatically, without a moment’s hesitation, of the needs of others. You cannot teach kindness or compassion.”

She took one of his hands in her empty one and interlocked their fingers, taking no notice of his unshed tears wetting it, locking their eyes as well as she gazed up at him with a fierce intensity that made Menelaus balk, but also stirred some silent, unnamed part of him.

“I chose you because I  _ love _ you, Menelaus, never doubt that. But I also chose you because I know you will be fair and kind to my people, and you will be as dear to Sparta as you are to me.”

This pause was longer, but it was less tense, spreading and warm like golden sunlight in late afternoon.

“Now this one’s addressed to you” Helen said, putting aside the fearsome, frantic tablet and pointing at one of the top lines on a much simpler looking work. The writing was big and bold and Menelaus would have felt patronized if he wasn’t already overwhelmed with relief. At least he could begin to parse this one, even if he could not read what was written. For example, he could tell that the group of signs Helen indicated was separated somewhat from the rest, a single word, almost certainly the address she had mentioned. His curiosity piqued, he leaned closer, studying the signs, his brow furrowed. 

“Is that… is that my name?” 

“No, it just says ‘king’ - see, here’s the word. See the symbols” and here she took his wrist in her dainty hand and placed his pointed finger underneath the series of marks. “wa-na-ka”

Menelaus repeated her under his breath, traced the rough-hewn grooves in clay. He mouthed the syllables and stared intently as though he were trying to memorize the invisible connection between them. There was a power there, something ancient and severe, as arcane and binding as that stored in the crown he wore, and he ached to know it.

“So it’s addressed to your father then.”    
  
“Well, my father right now,” Helen granted. “But the day we’re married, that position will become yours. All its privileges and its duties, all its debts and resources.”   
  
“Helen…”   
  
“You’re intimidated, I know.” She finished for him “I can tell. But I’ll help you, Menelaus. And you won’t even have to ask”   
  
“I… I will support you as well. And I will - I do - welcome your aid. I am glad for it. Relieved.”   
  
“Whatever challenges may face us, we can, we will, meet them together. For the rest of our lives, we will have each other to lean on.” With that, she put it down, took Menelaus’s other hand in hers, knitted together these fingers as well and reassured her betrothed with one last kiss on the lips. In her lingering kiss, Menelaus felt the longing for the future she imagined, and in the slanting light, her dark hair glowed with a crown of its own.   
  



End file.
